Politics & Power Quote by Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan is selling an old-school political ideal with a tactician’s precision: voters will forgive ideology, even occasional scandal, if they believe you mean it and can do the job. The line lands because it’s almost managerial in its simplicity. No grand theory of democracy, no romance about “the people.” Just two traits, cleanly paired, like the minimum viable product for leadership.

The phrasing is doing more than praising virtue. “Sincerity and competence” reads as a rebuke to the twin failures modern politics routinely offers: the polished opportunist who can’t govern, and the zealous true believer who can’t execute. Noonan’s subtext is that cynicism isn’t merely a moral problem; it’s an operational one. A leader who performs authenticity without substance produces chaos. A technocrat who can’t communicate conviction breeds mistrust. Put the two together and you get not perfection but legitimacy.

“In politics, it is everything” is intentionally absolutist, the kind of sentence meant to cut through the fog of partisanship and media spin. It also smuggles in a warning: the currency of politics is belief, and belief is fragile. Noonan, a Reagan-era speechwriter turned columnist, is writing from the vantage point of an insider who watched charisma become a governing mandate - and later watched competence get downgraded as politics turned into permanent performance. The line works because it flatters voters’ self-image (“we can spot the real thing”) while quietly setting a harsh standard that few leaders, in practice, can meet.